Stickers

[William_J_G Overington]

In https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html there is the following, 
near the start.

> For proposals that may not have all the information required we 
> encourage you to use other mechanisms such as stickers, gifs, etc. to 
> share with the world.

What exactly is a sticker please?

For example, if someone produces and publishes an OpenType font with a 
colourful glyph that is not mapped to a Unicode code point and the 
publisher declares that the glyph can become displayed by an application 
program by entering the sequence %9217 whereupon glyph substitution will 
take place, substituting the colourful glyph for the five glyphs of the 
sequence, provided that the application program has the ability to act 
upon the liga table that is in the font and ligature substitution is 
switched on, is  that a sticker in Unicode parlance? Or is it something 
else, and if so, what is it please?

If people start using such sequences for glyphs then the result could be 
as potentially ambiguous as using Private Use Area encodings.

However, I remember the way that new groups were added to the Usenet alt 
hierarchy, using a process of making a proposal in the alt.config group 
and discussion taking place for around a week and then starting of the 
new group then usually proceeding. This avoided name clashes, helped 
structure and was a generally helpful process. So these days, a mailing 
list or a wiki could be used for an informal, non-obligatory, helpful 
forum for such folk encoding so as to try to avoid duplication of 
sequences and possibly to try to keep some sort of structure.

Encoding of glyphs in regular Unicode is good, yet for glyphs that do 
not get encoded this could be a useful technique.

William Overington

Monday 8 February 2021